“Be Yourself”: A Campaign For Women To Embrace Their Unique Beauty.

Tuesday June 25, 2019                      By: Sandra Magdy

My Never-Enough Beauty

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Graphic Designer Sandra Estefane 

Like many girls, I want to live like the olden dayswhere elegance, decorum, and clean streets were the norm. However, this is not the only reason why I want to live there, but also because in this era beauty standards were simply your own uniqueness.

As I was scrolling through my newsfeed on Facebook, I found a post with pictures of actresses from that era, Soad Hosny, Nadia Lotfy, and others. OMG! I was amazed at how different they looked from each other. Different body shape, different style, different skin tone, hair color, and even the shape of their eyebrows was diffrent. One never feels they were another version of the same person, like nowadays.

And I keep wondering “Why am I living in this “plastic” era, chasing a mirage of perfect beauty and trying to become someone else, someone who just isn’t me?

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Graphic Designer Sandra Estefane 

Watching our local TV shows and series these days, I see identical faces: the same facial features of this actress, and that actress, and this artist, and that singer. Watching a young celebrity on the screen, my mother asked me, “who is she? What’s wrong with her face?” I was confused too. She looked like many others. They all have the exact same eyebrows shape, identical small and tiny nose, same body curves and even same lips.

As a woman, it became hard for me to compete with the beauty standards I see on social media. All the girls I see are perfect. They have perfect skin, perfect body, perfect hair, perfect style. Everything about them is just impeccable. That led me to wake up every day hating myself more and more. I couldn’t accept my beauty, it was never enough, no matter how much I tried or how much money I spent to get “the perfect beauty look”. Nothing was enough!

I couldn’t help but wonder if perfect beauty really exists. Look at Shwikar and Shadia, neither were skinny. Marlin Monroe didn’t have a flat belly. Faten Hamama had short haircut with no extension. Soad Hosny eyebrows were not identical. They simply were beautiful, genuine, authentic women. That’s what I want to be, ME: a real, imperfect HUMAN, not a perfect doll.

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Graphic Designer Sandra Estefane 

You know? If I am granted a wish, it would be to accept myself and how I look, just the way I am, without changing anything. I am not against makeup or skincare routines or that I don’t dream to have healthy hair, flawless skin and the perfect body shape. But it frustrates me how this dream translates into self-hate because of all the fake standards that are continuously promoted around us.

I wish every girl recognize how beautiful she is and how unique her features are. I hope one day we can accept how we look and how our bodies are different, appreciate it, love it, embrace, and be genuinely happy with it.

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Graphic Designer Sandra Estefane 

When we reach this point of happiness, we will look in the mirror, and then and only then we will see a special, beautiful woman!

Girls, let’s tell each other how beautiful we are! Say a daily compliment to your friend, text her, let her know how beautiful she was yesterday. Let’s support each other, build our confidence again and make sure that we know how beautiful we are, because, in a world before plastic surgery, every beauty was still UNIQUE. And now, it’s time to bring our uniqueness back in style, in our culture, and to our convictions.

Campaign idea created by Sandra Magdy
Graphic Designer  Sandra Estefane

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2 comments

  1. Kudos Sandra thanks for this enlightened article. Artificially improving one’s looks deprives us of our identity, of what makes each individual unique and each one enjoys a special kind of beauty.

    Liked by 1 person

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